From Frameworks to Implementation: Comparing Academic and Media Discourse on Climate-Resilient Supply Chains

This study examines the evolution of environmental discourse in supply chain management (SCM) research from 2004 to 2024, systematically comparing scholarly trajectories with media narratives to identify critical implementation gaps at the theory–practice interface. Following PRISMA guidelines, we employ structural topic modeling on 6586 academic articles and 384,190 media articles (2019–2023) within the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, we document substantial growth in sustainability scholarship—from fewer than 200 publications in 2004 to over 700 in 2024—with research emphasis shifting from compliance-oriented frameworks toward strategic integration models. Systematic comparison reveals significant misalignments: six domains—community-based sustainability initiatives, climate adaptation strategies, plastic reduction mandates, food security resilience, event-driven crisis responses, and sustainable product design—receive substantially greater media emphasis than scholarly investigation, constituting what we characterize as the implementation knowledge gap. This gap reflects disconnection between theoretically sophisticated academic frameworks emphasizing long-term strategic integration and practitioner concerns prioritizing acute operational challenges, rapid regulatory compliance, and grassroots sustainability mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that, while academic research remains theoretically robust, it insufficiently captures short-term adaptation imperatives, community-level integration mechanisms, and sector-specific resilience strategies that climate volatility demands. By establishing a transferable analytical framework integrating media discourse with academic literature, this study advances sustainable supply chain management theory through reconceptualizing implementation challenges as central research concerns while generating actionable imperatives for aligning scholarship, policy interventions, and industrial strategies toward climate-resilient supply chain systems.